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About India

Introduction

In recent years, India has enjoyed consistently high rates of growth and steady improvement in human development. However, even as the world’s largest democracy remained resilient in face of the global economic crisis, the country faces a critical challenge similar to several other BRICS counterparts – high growth has been accompanied by persistent poverty and inequality. The country’s Human Development Index value when adjusted for inequality loses 28 percent of its value. The imperative of faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth is central to the Government of India’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17) as well as to the United Nations Development Action Framework (UNDAF 2013-17). Read More

History

When India became independent in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru stressed the importance of the task that lay ahead of ending poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity. In view of these concerns, the Planning Commission of India was set up to formulate the country’s Five-Year Plans for assessing all the available resources, augmenting deficient resources, and for determining priorities. As the 1st Five-Year Plan (FYP) was launched, it however, did not spell out any speciﬁc planning strategy linking sectoral investment proposals to the objective of the Plan. However, in the 2nd FYP, the principles of ‘socialistic pattern of society’ underlay the planning strategy and emphasized social gain. It put stress on raising standards of living by raising national income through a rapid industrialization process with focus on heavy industry. This was expected to generate employment opportunities and reduce inequalities in society by trickling down benefits to the poorer sections in society. Read More

Challenges

Persistent inequality is reflected in the low human development attainments of the country’s most marginalized groups including scheduled castes, tribal and rural populations, women, transgenders, men who have sex with men, people living with HIV and migrants. Read More

Successes

The world’s largest and fastest growing democracy, India has today emerged a major leader in key global and South-South initiatives. On other fronts too, India has shown remarkable progress. For example, the Indian economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.5 percent during 2005-06 to 2007-08. In addition, the manufacturing sector too grew by 8.9 percent in 2009-10, compared to 3.2 percent in 2008-09. Since its inception in 2006, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has brought the ‘right to work’ to the front stage of the discussion on social protection. The average wage rate per day has also increased from US$ 1.29 in 2006-07 to US$ 1.79 in 2009-2010. The National Rural Health Mission has strengthened public health systems by increasing community participation, adding to human resources in the system, improving health infrastructure, public health management and increasing public expenditure on health. Furthermore, as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, construction of around 1.5 million houses for the poor and slum dwellers has been approved. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, launched in January 2010 aims to create a capacity of 20,000 MW grid solar power, 2000 MW off-grid solar applications and 20 million square metre of solar thermal collectors by the year 2022. Efforts to provide electricity, safe drinking water, telephones and broadband connectivity to remote villages are also continuing.